"Making Light of All the Heavier."
On Confessional Poetry, Writing, and Girlhood
Fiona Apple has been my favorite musician since my senior year of high school. In the middle of the pandemic, half-in-love and half-out with a girl who wanted me first but wrung me out to dry, Fiona Apple dropped her fifth album, titled “Fetch The Bolt Cutters.” 13 songs. I’d heard “Tidal,” before, the crooning, syrupy songs of haunted teenage girlhood, perfect for swaying in front of a mirror and imagining another’s eyes on you, crying in the shower and on the walk home from school. “Fetch The Bolt Cutters,” is a different sort of album entirely.
“There’s no hope for women.” There’s no real proof she said that, but Fiona Apple was alleged to have repeated this desolate mantra while the photographers for SPIN magazine’s November 1997 cover paused for a breather. That was the first I’d heard of Fiona Apple’s mind beyond glimpses gleaned from “Criminal,” and “Pale September.” I lived with that thought echoing in my mind for months, years. Every catcall, bad boyfriend, every unremembered night waking to a sticky morning singing the song of no hope for women.
In 2017, Fiona Apple said it wasn’t true. There is hope for women, “because women are the hope.” She said she didn’t mean it; a moment of quiet desperation crystallized suffering into a quote damning feminism, painting her as the covergirl for wounded women uninterested in recovery. In 2020, she released “Fetch The Bold Cutters,” an album full of hope. In one of the most hopeless times of my life, I found Apple a sister to me on this record. I still remember where I was when I listened to it. “I Want You To Love Me,” breaking my heart in fading evening light after a day of begging this girl to call me, saying I miss you until the words lost meaning.
I was trying to clean my room and put the album on just for background noise. I stopped in the center of that pale-blue childhood bedroom, and sat down on the floor with my head in my hands. I didn't move until the album was over; then, only to lay in my bed with my headphones in, the album on repeat until morning.
I’ve felt a lot of songs on that record sang my life from her mouth; from “I Want You To Love Me,” to “On I Go,” a song I listened to on the last walk around my childhood neighborhood the morning before I finally moved out of my parent’s house. On I go, not toward or away / Up until now it was day, next day. A frozen moment before everything changed. Suffice it to say Fiona Apple’s “Fetch The Bolt Cutters,” has become an album which carried me through the turbulence of ending girlhood into young-womanhood.
Track 10, “Cosmonauts,” is a song I can’t seem to shake. Not one of my immediate favorites, this is a song I return to over and over, cradling it in my palms as I parse the lyrics like prayer. It makes me cry every time I listen to it, and I won’t explore why here, yet, because I’m not sure even I could bear it. In the chorus, she asks, How do you suppose that we've survived? Come on, that's right, left, right / Make light of all the heavier.Yes, it’s a song about a relationship’s struggle for survival, but over time these lines have become a gospel for my survival. Left, right. Day, next day. Make light of all the heavier.
I write as catharsis. When I was first beginning to write, I took inspiration from Anne Sexton, her own tortured conscience, “confessional poetry.” At the time, that phrase confused me. How could any poem not be confessional? Each line I wrote revealed an essential truth about me I was afraid to say aloud, these empty word documents a silent cathedral I whispered in. Flickering light and loneliness. Anne Sexton was able to bravely bare the bleeding truth of her life’s suffering to an audience. First, though, it was just her: alone and writing desperately. Flickering light. My work was and remains honest, often brutally. It is an exorcism, after which I feel free; lighter.
I was born / doing reference work in sin, and born / confessing it. This is what poems are: / with mercy / for the greedy, / they are the tongue’s wrangle, / the world's pottage, the rat's star.From Anne Carson’s “With Mercy for the Greedy.”
I have adopted Apple’s “Make light of all the heavier,” alongside Florence Welch’s “Let me hold it lightly,” from her 2018 song “100 Years,” off the album “High as Hope,” another record whose songs have aged with me from adolescence to young adulthood. First it was “Hunger,” but now “100 Years,” seems to be the song I can’t step back from. Lord, don't let me break this / Let me hold it lightly / Give me arms to pray with / Instead of ones that hold too tightly. To write, for me, it to let me hold my pain lightly, to make light of what in me is so heavy as to be unbearable. It is essential to my being, and not always beautiful.
Lightness means there is hope for women. I needed that hope at 16, 17, 18, and I need it now at 21, same as it ever was. I will continue to write, even if no one reads it, even if it atrophies in the misshapen web of my laptop until the sun burns out because I write to survive. To make light of my pain, to hold it lightly, is to write it down. And not always to exorcise; often, to preserve, to watch again later, to learn from. I have taught myself a new way to live by writing it down, the ugly and beautiful truth of it. “Because women are the hope.” The writings of these women, varied as they are (Fiona Apple, Florence Welch, Anne Sexton among a hundred others) have been the hope for me. I write to be hopeful, to be lighter, to live through this.
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NOTE: This essay serves as my “About,” page on Substack. I feel it investigates and articulates the purpose of this publication, of my writing, in a way that no simple blurb or plea for subscription is able to. I’m too proud to keep it locked in there, though, so it serves a dual purpose as my first post here.
ALSO: Here’s a great article I read about Fiona Apple while writing this, and here’s the entire poem I referenced by Anne Sexton, which also linked in the body of the article (just in case).